I don't personally mind 300 hour games but the way AC and most other games present them is exhausting. I don't want my map full of shit to do. I want to get the core experience, which should be the main story and after that sprinkle of stuff to do here and there which is all optional and there if enjoyed the world enough to keep going.
Why Ubi and others haven't figured this out, I have no idea. It's the best of both worlds.
Yeah, would much prefer depth of content to breadth. I love exploring and finding things as much as the next completioninst, but if it is just filler, the world feels hollow. Last handful of AC games have been massive maps with very little uniqueness outside the main story. Also hate auto generated fetch quests and mobile game stores they shove in.
Ghostwire Tokyo felt like a pretty good length for an open world game. There were a bunch of relatively short side quests, and the usual collectibles but the whole thing was 100% complete in under 30 hours. Thier rougelike DLC add-on might push it over that, but it's basically a whole separate game.
Same, and I didn't even finish Inquisition. Bioware didn't need open world filler injected in its narrative based games and worlds, and those forced elements are what killed them off for a while. Then there was the disaster that was Anthem, which also had big, shallow open world and a craptacular mission design that forced you to a full stop to grind dumb boring shit (at which point I quit) before continuing the not terrible, but barely adequate campaign that I would've probably managed to finish if not for that grind gate.
When BioWare announced they had made each planet on Andromeda bigger than the largest area in Inquisition, my stomach sank, because Inquisition had already been pushing it with the bloat.
I watched a review by this YouTuber who hated Andromeda but decided to give it another shot on a whim, only this time to just do the main and loyalty missions, and he said it was like night and day and the game actually was good and the story felt better and like there were actual stakes. All that more for the sake of more hurt the game more than a lot of folks realize.
With regards to taletells implimentation of it, I found it pretty badly done. IE namely they used it for choice based story games… but I felt them pretty damn weak in that area. (in the sense that 99.9% of the story is pretty set in stone, and usually based on the most common choice, you go back and do the opposite, and everything plays out pretty much identically except maybe one or 2 one liners will change).
IE I remember the walking dead… Kenny was a mostly cool guy, who was always in conflict with a hot head old man, obviously the natural way most people play is to take kenny’s side in the conflicts. In the end the hothead leaves you for dead and kenny saves you.
then replaying it… basically with constantly taking hotheads side, being a jerk to kenny at every juncture along the way. so you get the alternate ending, where hothead punches you out, and kenny saves you… but adds in the comment “even if you are an asshole”. while rescuing you.
and honestly the episodes just branch that further in story, largely they clearly didn’t have the resources to make a wide ever branching story that you think it is… so you just get little bits that all merge back into the same path overall.
I think the only game that really let you branch out with your choices was Detroit: Become Human. You could literally delete fully playable characters and their storylines from the game by the first choice you make with them.
They could’ve postponed that for like half a year, but they seem to doubt they’d sell anything then, after release. Bad PR move for already troubled game. I think it’s a really bad sign if publishers does just that.
I’ve played and finished a lot of really brutal games on brutal difficulties.
If you think, in the situation where a game is simply too hard for you to progress, that dropping the difficulty so that you can experience the game you paid money for is giving up your “dignity”, you have a really fucking toxic relationship with your ego/self image/self worth, and with all the care and compassion in my heart you need to take some time to look inward. I do not say that as a judgemental statement. I say it because you will be happier and more satisfied if you can unlearn that.
Allow yourself the compassion to not reach your goals. Pursue your goals with fervour and drive and passion, of course - but be compassionate enough to yourself to let them go when they do not serve you.
It’s hilarious to me when people whine to devs that changing the difficulty is bad, because what, do we really want to view beating a single player game as competitive? It’s single player. Who cares.
I would if I could, but Dying Light didn’t have that option. It also didn’t have the option to let me quit a mission after I got softlocked behind a room full of bullet sponge enemies, having run out of every resource because those stay gone for good even when you die and reload.
A game that comes to mind for me is Frostpunk. It has easy, medium, hard, and extreme. Naturally I selected normal at first.
Normal difficulty Frostpunk is not for beginners. I learned that very quickly. That game was basically the dark souls of city builders. It was a super fun game though, and probably near the top of my list of best games I’ve played.
They changed the difficulty names in FP2 to citizen, officer, steward, and captain. I believe the default is citizen there. I guess even they realized there is nothing easy about that game. FP2, while a drastically different game, was also hard.
In my experience, the really difficult part of frost punk is initially just understanding the shape of the situation the player is in.
Like, like most will fail on normal because they just don’t know what options are available to them and what pressures they’ll be put under over time.
After one successful play through I found the game a lot easier just because I knew what I was up against and what resources I had at my disposal to deal with it.
this was my experience as well. took me like 6 tries to do the first mission on normal. then all the others i did first try (although not exactly optimal).
a few months later i did the first mission on hard - first try.
its almost a bit dissappointing, because FP is a lot of fun, but once you “get it”, it kinda feels like a lot of the challenge you feel early on is gone.
Yeah. Like… Uh. Major spoiler. Don’t open if you haven’t finished.
Frost Punk 1 spoilerThe sheer length of the end game freeze was crazy. Of course, if you knew just how long and how intense it would be then it wouldn’t really be fun to encounter. The fun of that is the surprise of how long and intense it is, even with the game telling you that you need tons of food it’s still crazy.
But even apart from that, there are times when you make decisions based on limited information only to realize there is something that gives you more options soon after, and if you’d pursued that other thing you wouldn’t have needed the first thing. These was a bit of that in FP1 and FP2. I liked 1, didn’t finish 2 but I still liked it. My main complaints about 2 were the UI being wonky and a few mechanics not being very clear.
I appreciate the devs of FP1 making it so buildings didn’t need to be smushed. There used to be this way you could trick the game into shoving more buildings in than it typically allowed, but they just made that happen by default. Changes like this deserve praise. Pointless micromanagement should always be eliminated.
@theangriestbird
In addition to ego (which I'm sure plays a role) I think I would find myself reticent to lower the difficultly to "Easy" for a couple reasons
The default difficultly, which is typically "normal" is often the intended experience, and if I can play like that, I see value in it.
Related to (1), difficulty settings are often poorly thought-out; it's quite common for hard mode to simply make enemies bullet sponges or for easy to turn them into cardboard cutouts, which is a disappointing experience.
Yes… Because all those games where you play as some American grunt fighting in the middle East is something totally different and not comparable at all.
I want to see you explain how Spec Ops: The Line is the same thing as this propaganda shit piece.
I get the gist, I agree that games like America's Army shouldn't be on Steam but you can't just broad stroke all "grunt in the middle east" games as propaganda. They can end up being something totally different and not comparable at all.
Couldn't tell you I'm afraid, I also haven't bought it. I grabbed DR2 because I saw it really cheap on sale and just wanted a rally sim rather than seeking out a specific one
If you're able to, get the version with the all the DLC. I think I paid £5 for that vs £3 for just the base game. The extra stuff is well worth getting
I have both. EA WRC looks, feels and runs WAY worse compared to Dirt Rally 2.0, and that’s on my fairly beefy 5800x3d / 7800 xt desktop machine. Dr2.0 also runs perfectly on my steam deck, while I haven’t even bothered to try running EA WRC on it (it would run like shit if it ran at all, plus the install size is like a gajillion GB).
On the upside, the tracks are way bigger / longer in EA WRC, some of them are a bit more interesting, and there’s a cool pseudo-roguelite mechanic in the campaign mode where every week you choose what to do (main race or side race to appease the sponsor, recruitment of team members, resting, etc.). That said, I couldn’t bring myself to finish a single season due to how pathetically janky the driving is.
Be sure to grab it (DR 2.0, that is) before it’s inevitably delisted, it happens with all heavily licensed games. Even the original Dirt Rally is still fantastic if you have an older rig IMO, and it was going for two bucks years ago.
Well, you wouldn’t get far even trying to run EA WRC on the steam deck, as they added kernel level anti cheat after launch so it’s now incompatible with Linux.
I can barely justify 50€ for a massive game like Baldur’s Gate 3. I’d never pay that much for any other game that is not on this scale. But 80 bucks? The fuck are they thinking?
I got bored with Borderlands 3 in one hour. Copy pasta gameplay and I’m tired of the art style and humor. I only paid a fiver but I wish I had bought a burger instead.
I thought Borderlands was lots of fun, but not four games (for now) and a movie (for now) worth of fun. Even two games was pushing it a bit. You can only stretch things out so much.
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